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Climate Central: 1001 Blistering Future Summers

What will your normal summers feel like with climate change? This is the question Climate Central asked when building their 1001 Blistering Future Summers interactive. They took summer high temperature data for 1001 cities across the U.S. and looked at what people can expect ‘normal’ to feel like by the end of the century.

The results are startling. The Pacific Northwest will feel like Southern California, the Napa Valley will feel more like today’s New Orleans and living in Phoenix, Arizona will be more like living in Kuwait City today.

Even worse for the future inhabitants of these cities, the data doesn’t take into account humidity and dew point – just temperature. So while it sounds like you could handle 40oC (100oF) hot summers, if you add humidity it becomes unbearable.

That’s the point that this nifty interactive graphic is trying to make – if we don’t stop burning fossil fuels and allow climate change to continue unabated, there will be many cities in the U.S. that will become increasingly uncomfortable to live in as well as places that are actually uninhabitable in the summer.

It’s getting hot out here, and business as usual means it’s only going to get uncomfortably hotter. Welcome to the new normal.

Climate Access is an initiative of The Resource Innovation Group's Social Capital Project. We are grateful to our founding partners, the Stonehouse Standing Circle and the Rutgers Initiative on Climate and Society.